Trust me, I'm a Doctor

Slight modification to our grabber to improve grip, we attached surgical hose to the Lego pieces to improve friction. This prevents the rings from slipping out of the grabber, making it easier for us to move the rings to the rack and score points.

One does not simply... oh wait

This is our Tel-op running Sonic, we still need to write an autonomous program for the IR beacon and elevate the arm for higher rows. In the mean time, however, we have a working arm that can quickly and easily place rings on the bottom row of the rack.
Another benefit of this test was that we discovered we could remove the rings from the grabber by simply tilting it, removing the need for our other ring flipper and making the transfer of rings from rack to rack that much simpler.

Arms Race

Today our working design is due; it must be coded and be able to pick up a ring. Our grabber design is finished, so now its just a race against the clock to get an arm working so that our grabber can actually reach the rings.

Like a moth to the flame...

Casey finished coding for our IR (infrared) sensor on the robot. Now, as you will see, Sonic will circle while searching for the IR beacon and then drive and follow the beacon once it is found.

Sonic will use this IR sensor to identify the column with the IR beacon in the challenge. Now we have to finish and code our arm design so that Sonic can place the ring on the correct column without any human control; i.e. autonomously.

Invisible Sun

This picture shows the beacon and IR light that Sonic follows while in autonomous. This light is invisible to the human eye, but electronic cameras, such as the one that took this picture, and electronic sensors can see and follow this light.

Bodybuilding

Nik is working on the Solidworks model of our arm for Sonic. Once we have our model, we can build the arm and test it out.

Organization

Organizing our parts in order to take inventory and figure out which parts we need to order. This is important  as Lego and Tetrix parts are not cheap, so we can only order what is necessary.

Yours, mine, and ours

Today we combined our ring grabbing system and our ring release system, finding the two to work almost perfectly together. With some design modifications to improve performance, this system will work beautifully to grab and place rings.

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20% Cooler